Why is subjunctive used here?
In my learning material, which is for Latin American Spanish, there are sentences like these:
"Es una pena que haya llovido durante tu partido."
"¡Estoy contento de que usted traduzca porque yo no hablo ruso ni japonés!"
Why are subjunctives used? There's no doubt, expectation, uncertainty, or something like that here. It did rain during the game; someone did translate russian and japanese for some others. The figures show these scenarios.
3 Answers
"Es una pena que haya llovido durante tu partido."
You are informing the person about how you felt; they already know that it rained.
In both cases, although these situations did occur, the person speaking of the events is expressing their emotions or feelings about the events.
From the reference section:
- Emotions Being annoyed, angry, happy, regretful, sad, scared, or surprised all fall into this category. Any personal reaction to a situation is emotional. The focus is not on a factual observation of a situation but how is makes the subject feel. Since how a person feels is always subjective, you use the subjunctive.
The subjunctive is invoked to express emotion. This is why it is used in the examples you gave.
"It's a shame that + subj"
"I am happy that + subj"
